“... he was pushed. And even Dr Drury, the charismatic and up-market Head eloquently celebrated by Byron, proves to have had a seedier side. He was so keen to maximise his own profits he moved out of his official house to make way for more boarders; the house degenerated into such a foul slum that the governors were forced to add a ‘repairing clause’ to ...”

“... We are a very long way here from the possibility of a writer’s life being ‘snuffed out’, as Byron put it (with Keats in mind), ‘by an article’.The valiant contender for literary fame is typically opposed, in Johnson’s verse and prose, to a hostile public. Such an oppositional relationship was inevitable. The would-be poet, essayist, novelist or ...”

“... in English literature from Shakespeare downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not ...”

“... the American literary critical scene has swept the six major poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats all count as ‘canonical’) to prominence and indeed to modishness, without for a moment implying that radicalism or atheism have suddenly become acceptable doctrines with which to confront the young. A highminded exercise in ...”

“... The balance and sustenance of alternate tones are often in Larkin, as they were in Byron, a balance and sustenance of alternate rhetorics, neither of which is authentic in itself but which in conjunction and mutual critique can be magnanimously right.It is a feat of this book that, for all its grudging and its grudges, it should feel so ...”

“... end, and was therefore tragic. Macaulay in a famous passage spoke of the British public savaging Byron in one of its ‘periodical fits of morality’: ‘He was excluded from circles where he had been the observed of all observers. All those creeping things that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their repast; and they were right, they did ...”

“... for great art, she nonetheless equates the ‘possession’ poets speak of with manic states. Byron, Blake, Coleridge, the Jameses, Melville, Van Gogh and, of course, Virginia Woolf are all tested, by their works and their known heredities, for bipolar illness and the findings are positive. While Jamison acknowledges that ‘there are many ...”

“... to publish made him a contemporary of the more flamboyant second Romantic generation, that of Byron. Crabbe looked all the more conservative and unglamorous as the poet of domestic and village life in the flatlands north of the Thames estuary. I encountered an undergraduate this summer, taking his final examinations at Oxford, who had been challenged by ...”

“... has bestowed on me’. This great blessing only momentarily delayed his visit to Dublin, prompting Byron to write: Ere the Daughter of Brunswick is cold in her grave,     And her ashes still float to their home o’er the tide, Lo! George the Triumphant speeds over the wave,     To the long-cherished Isle which he loved like his – bride. But George ...”

“... coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the culture of ...”

“... poets: he is an admirer and a translator (one can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the ...”

“... It was seemingly this illib-eral philistinism that made Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, de Quincey, Byron and Shelley all oppose the movement. Jane Austen – who was female and gentrified and self-accusing enough to waver – said that she thought that the title of Hannah More’s Evangelical novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, showed ‘pedantry and ...”

“... enlist a new member, he was betrayed and imprisoned. Isolated, with no books but ‘a Tacitus, a Byron and a Bible’, he decided that his life’s mission was to unite Italy under a republican government. Released after three months, he went into exile in Marseille where, in 1831, he formed the revolutionary movement Young Italy. Much abbreviated, the oath ...”

“... inclined to make women swoon – especially by contrast to the features visible in the sketch of Byron and Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, with whom Kemble was also flirting in the months leading up to her marriage. The letters she eventually placed in evidence during the divorce negotiations may have testified to her passionate love for her husband, but ...”

“... This select brotherhood was heavily into male bonding, arcane causes and Wordsworth and Shelley (Byron was too worldly and cynical). They wrote poetry themselves and communicated via interminable letters about the meaning of life and the problem of how to act in order to realise the self and redeem the world. But in Tennyson’s day the Apostles didn’t hop ...”